Nigeria Leads Africa’s Mobile Subscription Growth

With about three million new mobile subscribers added to Nigeria in quarter one (Q1), 2017, the country has led Africa to fresh nine million subscriptions, reaching a total of 985 million.

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The latest Ericsson Mobility report indicates that Africa has seen a major growth of new mobile subscriptions with 9 million Africans joining services in the first quarter of 2017. This rise has seen the total number of mobile subscriptions on the continent to 985 million edging ever closer to the 1 billion milestone. These figures see the African continent become fourth fastest growing market world wide.

The report said the industry has taken major steps to progress network, which has been facilitated by major investments.

While Nigeria added three million new subscriptions in Q1, India added 43 million; China 24 million; Indonesia 10 million and Pakistan five million.

The Ericsson Mobility Report informed that the number of subscriptions exceeds the population in many countries, which is largely due to inactive subscriptions, multiple device ownership or optimisation of subscriptions for different types of calls. As a result, the number of subscribers is lower than the number of subscriptions.

Today, there are 5.2 billion subscribers globally compared to 7.6 billion subscriptions,” the report noted. Reman informed that Ericsson foresees continued rapid growth of mobile connectivity as global mobile data traffic increases to eight times its current level by 2022.

According to him, for the next six years, nearly 2.6 billion new subscribers will be added to mobile broadband networks – enough to fill Africa’s largest soccer stadium, Soccer City in Johannesburg (with capacity of approximately 95, 000) 10 times each day.

The latest collection of statistics showed the highest year-on-year mobile data growth globally since 2013, led by massive growth in India, and highlights the underlying need for mobile data.